This document outlines the differences between this fork of SIGViewer and the original SIGViewer.
Briefly, the following changes have been made:
- Support for Oculus Rift CV1 (up to SDK v. 1.6.0)
- Streamlined setup and build process; support for multiple versions of Visual Studio
- Updated to more recent and better-supported version of some libraries
Due to the large number of dependencies the project has, and the need to ensure that many of them are compiled together with the same settings, a setup script, setup_env.ps1, to automatically download and configure as many dependencies as possible was written.
Relevant Commits:
e6c0f21f21bbd38828ae2d1a66f89430fce6812c ae23891e7cde9a9841397ac5de17ced8533da903 f20731adfae56888e6bd2a0784b56613e2a50c17 5c1cca4dcb3103010591f7e45022cc5cec754bad d00362eeebeafb6a169bc027e5fd4328d6ca7801 62bb212daef592921c666308859e6ce61adac9ae
To make the build process a bit more flexible and to make debugging build issues easier, the project was configured to reference the necessary headers and libraries via environment variables (which are automatically set by the script mentioned above) rather than with hard-coded paths. This allows users to customize their development environment more easily.
Similar changes were also made in forks of SIGService and X3D, so all the relevant SIGVerse projects can be set up and built from the same console.
Relevant Commits:
87e230ec738a142b762921a7eff2470b14ee8acd 32fbb54b4478d8b369cb0856685ba6646eab8e37 3dd9beec29bfd892cc85f5ce2ed3c47719696ce4
The project used to build against a very old version of CEGUI, which is no longer supported and required a great deal of effort to compile. Starting with 0.8 (the currently-supported version), the CEGUI team moved to CMake for building their project, which is much more convenient. This did, however, require making several changes due to many objects having different names in 0.8 and the general format of CEGUI's layout files changing.
Relevant Commits:
1d49867d330861f59d0db5467968dfa086436579 599255e686edbaf59c3e08e6287dde02fe54d0cf 143626840266b5eeb60263b869d2fa03d1346739 0a2b5eb9dec8eb212b8d20e1566a882bd2267733
The last version of the Oculus SDK to be supported was 0.4.3, which is unfortunately incompatible with the current hardware (even using the DK1, the 0.4.3 SDK is problematic for both Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015). Updating to the new SDK required rewriting most of the OgreOculus component. Previously, the Oculus Runtime would provide a distortion mesh and other parameters to the application, which could then be used to render a scene like normal, with the Rift acting pretty much just like another monitor from the application's perspective. Starting with SDK 0.8 they moved to a session-oriented model, in which the application no longer talks directly to the HMD at all. Instead, the application must obtain a texture from the runtime, render to that, then notify the runtime a new frame is available. Everything else, from the distortion to the actual display of the image on the HMD screen, is handled by the runtime.
Now, a large Ogre texture is generated at startup to hold images for both eyes, and two cameras are created to render to each half of this texture. Every frame the Ogre texture is updated, then copied into a texture provided by the Oculus runtime and submitted for rendering on the HMD.
Relevant Commits:
7aefd4e916cf34629e59ade864b29fb68f1e8abc d8bfe66bb96ce8830ca62250c84679672c5fac10 bb7e9f840f4828d9db1f1df56e8c69b054690a6d e6b71b33d2d1531523e29fe4621e7bc0c32833db a327d53e9097e8dcdece918a8ed166d9bcdbb288